[TYPO3-shop] products demo sites

[Wendy Egelston]

I just tried out several shops for a site.  The meta_oscommerce nearly 
crashed my whole site, and even with heavy experience in OsC, I couldn't 
ever get it to work.  The earlier version is even worse.  I never did 
get tt_products to work at all on the front end, but the only tutorial 
is in German, and I'm not convinced that Google translate was getting 
everything right -- too much of it had to be guessed at.  So I'm 
guessing that some important step got 'lost in translation'.  (And I 
tried virtually every other little shop in the extension repository, 
hoping to find a hidden gem -- all of them were either too buggy or 
would require a lot of effort to maintain.)

Also, I'm building a site for a group that needs the simplest possibly 
setup for long-term maintenance.  The more I played with tt_products, 
the more I wasn't sure if it was going to be easy for them to manage, or 
if they would need my help for constant upkeep.  I finally decided to 
build a simple zen-cart for them (based on OsC), and it will pop up in a 
smaller window, outside the Typo interface.  This isn't ideal by any 
means, but after building & maintaining a large online shop before, & 
knowing how useful it is to be able to handle all your shop details 
(products, shipping, order processing, etc.) from one simple interface, 
nothing provided so far in Typo3 cuts it, really.  The work-around for 
the pages is too clunky & un-intuitive.  We're sacrificing integration 
for manageability (for now).

In my developer's brain, I'm dreaming up an ideal solution, of building 
a really great shop plug-in that will easily fit into an existing 
template, etc.  I'm getting to love Typo, so maybe someday ... although 
it if it were that easy, I'm sure someone would have done it by now!

If you find a *good* English translation of the German tt_products 
tutorial (not one that just got stuck through the online translator), 
please please post a link!

Wendy